[In A Single Light, a] deaf-and-dumb girl whom the world has rejected, a pedant and a priest who have, each in his own way, rejected the world, are brought together by a marble statue of the Christ Child concealed in a remote Spanish church…. Roughly the first half is the girl's story, and it has the undeniable heart-tug of a Jane Wyman movie at a more measured pace. With the advent of Larry Katchen, the American, the somber absorption is blasted into facetious fragments; although he has a chance to recover his humanity, the book never recovers even a sympathetic conviction. It becomes a cryptoparable that masticates love and morality into pulp. (pp. 344-45)